Colorado Hearings Re-examine ’87 Murder Case

Thursday

A case in which a woman was found dead and sexually mutilated has been reopened and defense lawyers are seeking a retrial as suspicion is cast on an eye surgeon.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — The murder of Peggy Hettrick, 21 years ago this February, was a dark chapter in the history of this tidy college town on the edge of Colorado’s eastern plains.

Ms. Hettrick, a 37-year-old single woman, was last seen leaving a local bar alone and was later found in a frozen field, stabbed in the back and sexually mutilated.

The investigation of the 1987 killing focused on 15-year-old Tim Masters, a collector of survival knives who loved gore-dripped imagery and lived with his father in a trailer near the field.

No physical evidence or murder weapon was ever produced linking Mr. Masters directly to Ms. Hettrick, but on the basis of his drawings, his knives and a psychological profile, he was arrested more than a decade later, convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison.

A divided State Supreme Court upheld the conviction, but the dissenting minority said the drawings of mayhem and mutilation were so prejudicial that Mr. Masters had perhaps been convicted “not for what he did but for who he is.”

Now the case has been reopened with hearings that have riveted Fort Collins and the Colorado legal community. Mr. Masters’s new lawyers, in seeking a retrial, have cast suspicion on a Fort Collins eye surgeon, Richard Hammond.

Dr. Hammond, who also lived near the murder scene, killed himself in 1995 after being arrested as a sexual voyeur, but he was never considered a suspect in the Hettrick case. He was also acquainted, according to new court documents, with a prosecutor in Mr. Masters’s case, Terence A. Gilmore, who is now a District Court judge.

Evidence that might have raised suspicions about Dr. Hammond was never given to the defense team in Mr. Masters’s trial, according to documents and testimony in the hearings, including a report from a woman who said she had seen a middle-aged man with a “square jaw,” similar to the description of Dr. Hammond, exposing himself near the field where Ms. Hettrick’s body was found.

Notes from a behavioral scientist from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who disputed the theory that Mr. Masters’s drawings were linked to the crime have also turned up and were also never provided to the defense.

In addition, the jury was never told about a police interview with a plastic surgeon who said he had told an investigator that the way in which Ms. Hettrick was mutilated would have required a high level of surgical skill.

“We’re willing to admit that there are some things that should have been provided the first time around and weren’t,” said Don Quick, the Adams County district attorney, who is serving as a special prosecutor looking into the handling of the case. “We find it troubling.”

Mr. Quick said in an interview that he would decide in January whether the withheld evidence was important enough to have affected the verdict. He could then offer a recommendation to Judge Joseph Weatherby, who is conducting the hearings, and the judge could decide to let the verdict stand, order a new trial or dismiss the case.

Linda Wheeler-Holloway, a former Fort Collins police detective who at one point led the investigation of Ms. Hettrick’s killing, wants to see Mr. Masters freed.

“I’ve been a cop for over 32 years, and I’ve put a lot of people in prison,” Ms. Wheeler-Holloway said. “This is the one and only case where I felt there has been an immense miscarriage of justice. I think Tim is truly innocent.”

Ms. Wheeler-Holloway, now an investigator for a district attorney in Fort Morgan, who is helping Mr. Masters’s defense team, said she started questioning his guilt in 1992. Mr. Masters had enlisted in the Navy, and she had traveled to Philadelphia, where he was stationed, to arrest him.

Instead, after two days of intense interrogation, Ms. Wheeler-Holloway said she came away struck by the consistency of Mr. Masters’s story and his explanation that the graphic drawings were a product of teenage angst and nothing more.

“I began to have concerns that we’d gotten tunnel vision out of the starting gate,” she said.

Another Fort Collins police officer associated with the case, Lt. Jim Broderick, is still working with prosecutors. In an interview outside the courtroom, he said that errors could have been made because so many years had gone by between the crime and Mr. Masters’s arrest in 1998.

“There’s no question that when you’re dealing with a case that old, mistakes get made,” Lieutenant Broderick said.

Much has changed in Fort Collins since 1987. The trailer where Mr. Masters lived no longer exists, nor does the nearby field where Ms. Hettrick’s body was found. A once secluded area, it is now dotted with condominiums and office parks. But the two-story home once occupied by Dr. Hammond and his family still sits on Skysail Lane.

Dr. Hammond’s family moved after his death, and only a handful of people remain in the neighborhood from that time, but several neighbors recalled him as a quiet, friendly man and a respected physician.

In 1995, however, before the Hettrick case had gone to trial, hundreds of videotapes were discovered in Dr. Hammond’s basement, all produced by a hidden camera system in a bathroom that was positioned to capture images of women’s genitalia. The tapes included house-sitters, friends and members of Dr. Hammond’s family. After Dr. Hammond was arrested and released on bail, he committed suicide in a Denver motel.

Now, Mr. Masters’s lawyers are saying that the police and the prosecutors should have considered Dr. Hammond a suspect in Ms. Hettrick’s killing because he had the skill to perform the almost surgical mutilation of her body. They have also suggested that Judge Gilmore’s relationship with Dr. Hammond might have played a role.

Judge Gilmore, who declined to comment for this article, was interviewed about Dr. Hammond in August and said he had known Dr. Hammond only “peripherally,” but he said he had been to Dr. Hammond’s home for dinner.

Asked later if he had any reason to suspect the doctor in the Hettrick case, Judge Gilmore said, “I had absolutely no reason to believe he was involved.”

Referring to Mr. Masters, he added, “There wasn’t anybody else we could try to point a finger at.”

Some people who knew Dr. Hammond are now hard-pressed to see a brutal killer.

“The guy had some quirks, and he did something dopey, but that doesn’t make him a murderer,” said Leo Yudien, who lived next door and was a former patient.

Mr. Quick, the special prosecutor, also said it was too early to say whether justice went wrong.